Putting It All On the Line
Putting It All On the Line: Life Altering Injuries in College & Pro Football
For the average person an injury only consists of a strained back, a twisted ankle or a broken bone. These injuries may keep you out of work for a week or so at most.
For athletes who need their bodies in top performing shape, especially football players who use their bodies as battering rams, these minor injuries excluding a broken bone are just part of the job, and will happen to 100 percent of the players.
In football a minor injury like a sprained ankle doesn’t threaten the player’s career but other serious injuries could have an impact on how long or how well the athletes perform.
“The knee is the most easily injured part of the body on a football player,” said Charles Lane, an Athletic Trainer at East Carolina University. The knee is a notoriously weak part of the human body. It is put under a lot of stress supporting the weight of the body.
“The knee is made up of four main ligaments; the ACL, the PCL, the MCL, and the LCL,” says on the Orthopedic Associates of Portland website. Injuries to the knee can happen very easily in a football game.
“Very rarely is it a bone or the cartilage in the knee that gets injured; it’s the ligaments that get torn,” says Leslie Dent, an Athletic Trainer at ECU.
Kory Ison suffered an injury to his knee, tearing his MCL and partially tearing his ACL, during his sophomore year playing high school football. “I was pissed off and disappointed that I couldn’t play for the rest of the season.”
The next season on the varsity team he again was hit by an opposing player on the knee and tore his MCL and ACL. Kory said “I might have been able to get a scholarship to play at a school somewhere but after injuring my knee twice, I just couldn’t play anymore. My knee didn’t have the strength.”
In Kory’s case, he was still in high school and had plenty of time to recover, but in the pros and in college, an injury like that could put him out of a job or scholarship.
In the pros if you sustain an injury like that to your knee you will be able to rehab and try to make a comeback but a lot of the time you can’t perform at the same level and there are some injuries that can end your career instantly. “Other injuries that could affect your career are a serious concussion or a series of concussions and neck injuries,” says Leslie Dent.
A severe enough concussion can end a career, even more so now that the NFL has issued requirements for returning to play from a concussion. Concussions are very dangerous injuries because you are actually bruising, your brain which could have long term effects.
Any injury that leaves a player motionless on the field is the most frightening such as an injury to the neck that can damage the player’s vertebrae or spine. This kind of injury might not only knock you out of the sport that you play, but may make a player unable to get any other kind of job.
It’s something most fans don’t think about, but as trainers indicate, football players do their job with everything on the line. At any given moment they might be forced to retire permanently.
Charles Lane; ECU Athletic Trainer,
Leslie Dent; ECU Athletic Trainer,
Kory Ison; Football Player,
http://www.orthoassociates.com/
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